Mr. Espada, the defendant

Published 12:00 am, Thursday, December 16, 2010

Talk about utter candor -- and from a politician better known for being circumspect and disciplined. Listen to Andrew Cuomo, the departing attorney general, on the indictment of state Sen. Pedro Espada Jr.

"I'm about to leave this office, but I couldn't leave on a better note," Mr. Cuomo says, describing the charges against Mr. Espada as the most outrageous abuse of public office that he's ever seen.

Understandable sentiments entirely. For if Mr. Cuomo, now the governor-elect, is to have even a chance in his quest to clean up state government, he needs to put a stop to the graft and pillage of which Mr. Espada stands accused.

According to the indictment announced by Mr. Cuomo and the U.S. attorney's office, Mr. Espada and his son, Pedro Gautier Espada, stole brazenly from -- of all places -- a health care network that they ran. A health care network, keep in mind, that Mr. Espada went to great lengths to finance with the political slush funds known as legislative member items, and federal grants as well.

Remember, too, that it was Mr. Espada's zeal to keep his exorbitant share of legislative member items that helped motivate his defection to the Republicans in the Senate coup last year. That made him, for a time, president pro tempore of the Senate, first in line to succeed Governor Paterson when there was no lieutenant governor.

Money that should have gone to buy medical equipment and provide health care to an impoverished constituency in the Bronx instead paid for, prosecutors say, expensive restaurant meals, tickets to Broadway shows and an attempt to make a $49,000 downpayment on a Bentley.

If that's true, Mr. Espada just might qualify as the biggest scoundrel to yet emerge from a state government, particularly a state Legislature, that seems to be a magnet for people of such unseemly character. Reforming it will require even greater and more rigorous efforts to ensure that money doled out to legislators indeed is meeting a legitimate public purpose.

Mr. Espada still must be convicted, of course. But not even the presumption of innocence can keep him in the Senate. Bronx voters returned an unmistakable verdict when they voted him out of office in the September Democratic primary.

The message behind Tuesday's indictment extends well beyond him. So, too, does a culture of corruption. It had been barely a week since a state senator -- Vincent Leibell of Putnam County, in this latest case -- had been taken to justice. He pleaded guilty in connection with taking kickbacks from a lawyer who works for a foundation Mr. Leibell took care of with legislative member-item grants.

See a pattern?

This is public money. And we are the public. We have to let these politicians -- from the imprisoned, to the convicted, to the merely indicted, to those who have yet to arouse the suspicion of state and federal authorities -- understand that money isn't theirs to steal, or reward their families or their cronies. It's to pay for government itself, in a time of daunting fiscal challenges.

The next chapter of Mr. Espada's life needs to mark a new and very different era in New York. We await his trial.